The emergence of converged network interface controllers (CNICs) have provided accelerated client/server, clustering, and storage networking, and have enabled the use of unified TCP/IP Ethernet communications. The breadth and importance of server applications that may benefit from NIC capabilities, together with the emergence of server operating systems interfaces enabling highly integrated network acceleration capabilities, may make NICs a standard feature of, for example, volume server configurations.
The deployment of NICs may provide improved application performance, scalability and server cost of ownership. The unified Ethernet network architecture enabled by NIC may be non-disruptive to existing networking and server infrastructure, and may provide significantly better performance at reduced cost alternatives. A server I/O bottleneck may significantly impact data center application performance and scalability. The network bandwidth and traffic loads for client/server, clustering and storage traffic have outpaced and may continue to consistently outpace CPU performance increases and may result in a growing mismatch of capabilities.
Converged network interface devices are generally utilized to integrate a plurality of different types of network traffic into one physical network. Converged network interface devices may perform protocol acceleration and protocol processing beyond OSI layer 2 and may require considerable computational power. Certain types of traffic such as clustering traffic may require low latency. Storage traffic, for example, may require guaranteed delivery while using the shortest packets infrequently, with normal traffic patterns. Some type of traffic such as critical networking traffic may require varying levels of prioritization, while other networking traffic may require best effort.
The physical interface (PHY) layer corresponds to the physical layer within the Open System Interface (OSI) model, which may enable transmitting raw bits via communication links. The PHY layer, for example, Ethernet network may provide the hardware for sending and receiving data on a carrier, for example, cables. The medium access control (MAC) layer corresponds to the medium access control sub-layer of the Data Link layer within the OSI model. The MAC layer may enable controlling access to shared media networks, and may comprise addressing and/or channel control operations.
A common solution to this challenge has been to use different networking technologies optimized for specific server traffic types, for example, Ethernet for client/server communications and file-based storage, Fibre Channel for block-based storage, and special purpose low latency protocols for server clustering. However, such an approach may have various operating and/or operational cost issues, which may be disruptive to existing applications, and may inhibit migration to newer server system topologies, such as blade server systems.
A focus of emerging CNIC products may be to integrate the hardware and software components of IP protocol suite offload. The CNICs may allow data center administrators to maximize the value of available server resources by allowing servers to share GbE network ports for different types of traffic, by removing network overhead, by simplifying existing cabling and by facilitating infusion of server and network technology upgrades. The CNICs may allow full overhead of network I/O processing to be removed from the server compared to existing GbE NICs. The aggregation of networking, storage, and clustering I/O offload into the CNIC function may remove network overhead and may significantly increase effective network I/O.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.